"RED is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burns through. It glows in the blood which sustains and in the fire which destroys us, in the roses of our romance and in the awful cup of our religion. It stands for all passionate happiness, as in faith or in first love." -G. K. Chesterton

Thoughts: I was delightfully surprised at how interesting I found this book. I'd seen R. A. Salvatore's books around bookstores for years, and always assumed they were completely clichéd fantasy books, the kind people parody and make fun of. And in many ways, this book was one of those. The actual world itself was one you could easily find in a D&D guide. But moving the focus to the dark elves meant there was more room to explore an unusual culture, as well as the character arc of the only dark elf who manages to find a conscience amid his culture's shadowy cruelty.
Also, the fight skillz were awesome-sauce and the spider god was terribly creepy. Well done there.

I actually want to try the second in the series now, which I totally didn't expect.

2 comments:

The Forgotten Realms books are all based off of D&D actually, and are some of the books that do actually create the cliches that are now spoofed. Salvatore entered the series in 1988 (Ed Greenwood created it in 1975) with The Icewind Dale trilogy, The Dark Elf no-longer-a-trilogy came next (the first of which you read here).

I think that the important thing to keep in mind when reading these books is the fact that Salvatore did create some things that have now become cliched. They weren't cliched when he was writing this stuff.

Personally, I don't like some of the later books (I stopped reading when one of the main characters was given the wrong color eyes and had a talisman that stopped doing what it was originally meant to do when it was first created) but my sister is a big Artemis Entreri fan, so you may want to take a peek at some of those books after reading his first trilogy.